Cynerio delivers innovative medical device protection

Rambam Health Care Campus commonly known as Rambam Hospital, is piloting Cynerio’s cutting edge cybersecurity technology to protect its medical device ecosystem from cyber threats. In addition to being one of the most innovative in terms of adopting new medical technology to treat patients so that they have the most successful treatment possible, Rambam Hospital is now working with Cynerio to protect the data and safety of its patients.

Sara Tzafrir, CIO of Rambam Hospital, said, “Our hospital is one of the most innovative in adopting new medical technologies to make sure that our patients have the most successful treatment possible. The latest medical treatment relies on a myriad of devices to deliver the highest levels of care and best outcomes for our patients. We have a growing number of smart and connected medical devices that come with new risks to the clinical ecosystem that need to be addressed. We already work closely with all the best technology firms in Israel to secure our hospital and patients, yet we knew that there was still more to be done to secure our medical devices and we would need something innovative to meet the potential risks. Not only were we looking for proactive security and real-time protection for the service and data on our connected medical devices, we also wanted to gain full visibility into our medical device ecosystem and the associated risk. After a lot of careful considerations, we decided to pilot Cynerio’s technology.”

Cynerio’s ground-breaking technology was developed for the specialized needs of the healthcare industry, securing healthcare’s weakest link – the connected medical device ecosystem – by providing:

Rambam Hospital is the largest in Northern Israel and the only provider of Level-1 trauma medicine, with more than two million people depending on it for medical care and public health information, and also serves as the tertiary referral center for twelve district hospitals. Rambam is not only the referral hospital for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Northern Command, it also takes care of the US Navy Sixth Fleet, and the UN Peacekeeping Forces posted in the region. Rambam treats more trauma patients than any other hospital in the Israel, and the percentage of trauma survivors is the highest in the country.

Eyal Kellner, CTO of Rambam Hospital, said, “The hospital generates an incredible amount of sensitive data each year as a result of approximately 135,000 emergency department visits; 91,025 inpatient admissions; 687,750 outpatient visits; 55,350 surgeries; 267,975 imaging procedures; and more than 1,473,780 laboratory procedures. The hospital became aware that there is a large and growing number of connected medical devices in its ecosystem which could become vulnerable to cyberattacks, which was a concern due to the sensitive and valuable patient data it handles. Most of the devices used in healthcare’s clinical environment are outside the scope and capability of traditional IT security technologies, which elevated the issue to a critical threat. The hospital sought a technology that could show what’s happening in the medical device ecosystem, how many devices could be affected and also help to protect them, and is now working with Cynerio to protect our medical ecosystem. Cynerio’s medical workflow analysis technology uses machine learning to precisely model the behavior of the medical entities on the network, taking into account the medical workflows they are taking part in, providing very accurate anomaly detection that also takes medical context consideration.”

At Cynerio we know that protecting medical devices is important but it’s just part of the challenge. There is an entire ecosystem supporting these devices which includes gateways such as medical imaging picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), nurses stations, clinical servers, DICOM printers and middleware, that is also vulnerable and needs protection. It’s key to understand the ecosystem and the behaviour of the medical devices to provide a comprehensive solution.

We are already working with healthcare providers, deployed in leading hospitals in Israel like Rambam, and are now starting pilots in large US health systems.